It hashas much improved screen rendering and support for Cyrillic; better Latin language support for Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Azerbaijani and many others that had been missing before. I am still missing IPA (Phonetics), many African languages, Pinyin and Vietnamese and a few others. I would also like to add Greek. I look forward to adding these.

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I am very happy to announce that Merriweather Serif and Sans are available from WebInk’s web font service. There are now 52 styles to choose from (up from 16 on Google’s Web Fonts). The fonts come with kerning, Open Type features like multiple number styles, contextual alternatives, ligatures and even more language and currency support.

Still to come: Small caps, condensed styles and maybe expanded styles will be coming along as well. I will also see if I can get Vietnamese supported.

As with other announcements I encourage you to let me know what you are happy about and what you are not. It would be great to hear what you would like to see added too!

Just yesterday I found some fixes I need to make and push to this edition. Hopefully by the end of the week or possibly sooner they will be live. WebInk has been great about pushing fixes. Thanks WebInk!

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After discussing the possibility that commercially licensable version of Merriweather might be in technical conflict with the Google version we agreed that this kind of edition of Merriweather would need to be re-named. I have decided the new name will be Merriweather ST. This may be relevant soon.

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Perhaps the most exciting part of the new Merriweather release ( 12/26/2013) for me is a font developer geek discovery. I seem to have found a way of passing manual hinting into the auto-hinter TTFA. TTFA is what hints 99% of the font. It does a great job. But for the lower case g and the capital letter Ef if Cyrillic I was not happy. By passing manual hinting through TTFA I was able to get rendering of both letters to improve in Windows XP and Windows 7. This means even higher quality is possible for people using TTFA. I will be working to find out precisely how & why this happens with the author of TTFA Werner Lemberg so more people can take advantage of it. In the meantime if you want to try this – manually hint a glyph – say the ‘g’ for instance and then check the ‘pre-hinting’ checkbox in the GUI of TTFA. I’ll be interested to hear what people discover.

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Merriweather version 1.5 with Cyrillic, extended Cyrillic, and extended Latin – and hinting – has shipped to Google! There may be some improvements to the italics so their weight is a bit better with the romans in the next month but this is a huge upgrade in usability. I am very excited to see how people use it. This version also has support for Romanian and Moldovian localization in Open type features. A variety of bugs were also killed in this release especially the colon ‘:’ bug in bold. Although I suspect that nobody will notice nearly every glyph is improved in some way in this edition.

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This is a preview showing the new TTFA hinted rendering I am getting today. Although the new serif Merriweather offers a huge range of improvements over the old including a much larger glyphs set to support more languages, better print performance, prettier letters; the biggest difference for most people will be the way it renders in Windows. These samples are from IE8 running in Windows 7. I should note that rendering is better on the Mac OS X as well although I won’t be showing images of this in this post.

Note: You may need to click on the images to see them at full size

Here we see 8px in the current version (June 24 2013) and on the right the one that is coming soon. We can see that while the new one may not be lovely it is now readable.

Note: Some readers may need to click on the images to see them at full size

Here the main improvement is to the “g” although the height of the hyphen and the shape of the @ sign is better as well.

At 10px the new version shows increased regularity in height. The new version is usable whereas the old version was not. The clarity of the strokes is also increased.

The image above shows new support for more languages and the clarity of the new diacritics.

The 11px sample shows perhaps the least difference but even here the text reads slightly more easily on the right. The @ sign is clearly better. Hopefully the top of the 5 can be lifted in the final version.

To me 12px was the size at which the old Merriweather began to look ok. The new version begins to show some of the letter details like the improved K R T S { } along with the improved ascender clarity and overall improved cohesion. The type feels more solid and more reliable now.

At 13px the subtle raising of the x height becomes suddenly very obvious. In text this gives a more newspaper-like feeling. Even with the loss of whitespace between lines I find this easier to read. The changes to the shapes of ? { } are especially apparent as well.

At 14px the the slight lowering of the capitals which was done to better fit diacritics becomes obvious. The improvement to overall clarity of the new version is also on display.

Although at 16px the differences are minimizing the improvements to spacing are evident along with a subtle improvement to overall clarity. The slash in the ø Ø are less heavy and better looking in the new version.

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Use Merriweather in 30 seconds!

Use Merriweather in 30 seconds! Add this as the first element in the
<head> of your HTML:
<link href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Merriweather'
rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
Then add Merriweather to your CSS font stacks like any other font, for example: h1 { font-family: 'Merriweather', Georgia, serif; }

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